About CEP

Our mission is to increase the learning opportunities and enhance the academic achievement of homeless and highly mobile youth.

Our services

To advance our vision and achieve our mission, Community Education Partnerships raises awareness about the experiences of homeless youth and offers them:

Individualized tutoring and mentoring

Backpacks, school supplies, books, and learning resources

Opportunities to participate in extracurricular enrichment activities

Enrollment assistance

Our core values

We believe that:

Everyone has the right to a high-quality education

Homelessness should not be an obstacle to learning

Learning is empowering

Education can serve as a way out of poverty

Our philosophy of learning is based on:

A recognition of the intrinsic value of learning

High expectations and the rejection of deficit thinking

The belief that everyone can learn

The acknowledgment that what one has learned is not the same as what one can learn

A recognition of, and responsiveness to, distinct learning styles, as well as distinct forms of knowledge

Our philosophy of service is based on:

A recognition of the intrinsic value of service

The need for non-judgmental support

A responsiveness to community needs as identified by the community

A commitment to ensuring that community service is mutually beneficial for everyone involved

The belief that through service we become more aware of and sensitive to the needs of others as they evolve

A shared sense of personal responsibility and mutual regard for others

Who we serve

Community Education Partnerships serves homeless youth. Our definition of homeless is based on that of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Act. Homeless youth include:

Children and youths who are sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason;

Are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to the lack of alternative adequate accommodations;

Are living in emergency or transitional shelters;

Are abandoned in hospitals;

Are awaiting foster care placement;

Children and youths who have a primary night-time residence that is a public or private place not designed for or ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings;

Children and youths who are living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations, or similar settings;

Migratory children who qualify as homeless because they are living in circumstances described in the above clauses. (See the McKinney- Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act of 2001, section 725).

HISTORY

In 2008, CEP Founder, Erica Mohan, began volunteering with School on Wheels, an organization that has been tutoring homeless children in the Greater Los Angeles Area since 1993. In Spring of 2010, Erica began working full time for School on Wheels in their Downtown Learning Center. Understanding the critical need to academically support homeless children and realizing that the Bay Area lacked an organization specifically dedicated to providing such support, Erica founded Community Education Partnerships. CEP volunteers began providing mentoring and tutoring to homeless and highly mobile youth in Oakland and Berkeley in 2011. Since then, it has grown steadily and now serves students in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro, Richmond, and Alameda. ​

About Homelessness

About Homelessness

Reliable and accurate statistics regarding the homeless population are hard to come by. This, in part, has to do with problems of definition. Who exactly is considered homeless and who is counted by the homeless census? Moreover, many statistics capture a single point in time and, therefore, do not include all those who experience homelessness in a given year. This issue is compounded by the fact that many homeless individuals and families are highly transient. Nevertheless, although they vary somewhat between different reports and publications, the numbers all point to an alarmingly large homeless population in the United States. The National Center on Family Homelessness (2014) found that “Based on a calculation using the most recent U.S. Department of Education’s count of homeless children in U.S. public schools and on 2013 U.S. Census data:

2,483,539 children experienced homelessness in the U.S. in 2013.

This represents one in every 30 children in the U.S.

From 2012 to 2013, the number of children experiencing homelessness annually in the U.S.:

Increased by 8% nationally.

Increased in 31 states and the District of Columbia.

Increased by 10% or more in 13 states and the District of Columbia. (from America’s Youngest Outcasts: A Report Card on Child Homelessness, 2014. p. 14)

A SNAPSHOT OF HOMELESSNESS IN CALIFORNIA

​With over 37 million residents, California is the most populous state in the country. California also has the largest population of homeless students in the country and twice the rate of homeless students as the national average (2014, California Homeless Youth Project). In fact, “in 2009, nearly a third of all homeless students nationwide lived in California, according to the federal Department of Education” (2011, California Watch). America’s Youngest Outcasts: A Report Card on Child Homelessness (2014) assigns each state a ranking of 1 (best) to 50 (worst) based on a state composite score that reflects each state’s overall performance across four domains:

Extent of Child Homelessness (adjusted for state population)

Child Well-Being

Risk for Child Homelessness

State Policy and Planning Efforts

Each state received a score for each of the four domains. These are summed to compute the state’s composite score to produce the overall state rank of 1 to 50. California received a ranking of 48, as described in the report card below. (America’s Youngest Outcasts: A Report Card on Child Homelessness. (2014). Waltham, MA: The National Center on Family Homelessness at American Institutes for Research)

The academic REPERCUSSIONS of homelessness

“America’s Youngest Outcasts” states that “The impact of homelessness on the children, especially young children, is devastating and may lead to changes in brain architecture that can interfere with learning, emotional self-regulation, cognitive skills, and social relationships.” According to the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness, homeless youth are significantly less likely than their peers to be proficient in math and reading in elementary school. Research shows that these gaps in reading and math achievement are not made up over time, and only continue to grow through high school (Voight et al., 2012). Not surprisingly, "students experiencing homelessness struggle to stay in school, to perform well, and to form meaningful connections with peers and adults. Ultimately, they are much more likely to fall of track and eventually drop out of school than their non-homeless peers." (GradNation campaign, 2016).